Franz Ferdidand Live

The Franz Ferdinand I saw take the stage at the Moore on Easter Monday was a very different band from the one I saw some five odd years ago.
Though their sound has not changed since they put out their first disco-laced single, a half decade of hard touring has turned them from a disappointing, awkward mess into the band their relentlessly fun and swaggering music promises.
Franz Ferdinand melds the best excesses of '80s pop with the '70s funk guitar work that made ‘angular’ the most ridiculously overused word in music journalism for years after their debut.
Live, they blasted effortlessly and tirelessly through songs they had all but murdered so many years ago, and though the Moore is probably the absolute worst place for dancing people were doing their best for the two or so hours Franz Ferdinand played.
Wedged between two seats and broken cushion that kept hitting me in the back of the legs, I can only imagine what sort of ridiculous figure I cut.
There were two big surprises of the night: the bizarrely hipster-less, somewhat geriatric crowd, and the bands foray into more creative music territory, stretching some of their songs to double their length and devolving into what passes for feedback loops and freaked out guitar solos for a dance band.
Franz Ferdinand doesn't yet have the ability to pull off the colossal emotional breakdowns of Wilco or the effortlessly loose-limbed devolutions of Broken Social Scene, but their attempts were interesting in their own right.
Regardless, the show was great and catching them live now is entirely recommendable. Even if the hipster kids seem to have abandoned them, those interested in concepts like ‘fun,’ ‘dancing’ and darkly ambiguous dance music with cunning wordplay could do little better.

This is a video from that night, of the song 'Ulysses'. Kudo's to the poster- this is one of the only decent videos from that night. I was about three feet behind them- I remember watching them film this.